Mt. Judah

Spring-like weather and snow conditions existed on Mt. Judah today. We found firm, frozen surfaces on the northerly aspects. The melt-freeze crust on these aspects measured 8 to 10 inches in thickness and remained frozen all day. Rain runnels remain widespread on the north and east aspects, making snow surfaces uneven and challenging on these slopes. 

The E-SE-S-SW aspects softened quickly with soft wet snow forming on the surface by 10 am.  We triggered a small sluff of wet snow on an E-facing test slope at 10:30 am. The surfaces on sunnier, southerly-facing slopes have smoothed out as they have undergone more melting. The side effect is that they also have more rocks and other obstacles poking through, since less snow exists on them. Interestingly, we also triggered some collapses while ascending south-facing slopes (see instability comments for more details). We chose to forgo a second lap and stuck to lower-angle slopes for the rest of the tour. 

We triggered five collapses on sunny south-facing slopes. The two largest were about 100 ft in diameter, while the other three were more like 15 to 30 ft in diameter. When we dug into the snow, we could see a soft layer of wet snow below the melt-freeze crust. The melt-freeze crust had also softened to be only about 1f in hardness. We hypothesized that the melt-freeze crust had softened enough for us to collapse the weaker wet snow below it and that this may cease once the melt-freeze crust fully melts later in the afternoon or once the wet snow refreezes tonight.